Third week under COVID-19 lock-down in Austria (5. April )

6. April 2020 Leave a comment

General Situation

Three weeks have passed under lock-down and things have calmed downed, people are getting used to stay at home. Homeoffice, Home Schooling, etc. becomes more organized. Although many people (83%) accept the lock down in general, with these good weather conditions people tend to interpret the lock down a little bit too relaxed. But for thoses who get caught, getaways can become really expensive (up to 3600€). The police has announced that they will put additional effort to enforce the lock down including mountain police patrols and helicopters.

Good weather conditions — Good weather is bad for lock-down discipline

The number of infections is still on the raise but the rate is rather low. Under lock down the increase rate now has droped under 10% for many days. In addition masks are now mandatory for going shopping.

COVID-19 rate in Austria — Positive tested for Covid-19

Tracking is still a big issue and recently discussed in the media and politics. Google statistics show the effect of lock-down. Some politicans are discussing if the Red Cross’ Stop Corona App should be mandatory. Another idea is to automate the app’s handshake. Right now, a handshake with other app users has to be done manually. This isn’t done very often, especially with stranger e.g. at the super market. A future update may automate the handshake to track every people around you. Although a persons ID is anonymous, an automated tracking of everyone is not accepted by most people.

Azure Cloud and Business Applications

Last week the resources in the Azure Cloud region Europe were at its limit. The deployment of VMs in West/North europe often failed. This week we tried to deploy a Dynamics 365 Finance / SCM Tier2 environment. After days in status Queued we were adviced to place the environment in US South region.

Deploy Dynamics 365 Finance / SCM Tier2 environment in US-South Central

The highlight this week was the virutal launch event for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform april wave. Our company attended the event from our home offices while the speakers were presenting from their home offices.

From Home Office to Home Office: Business Applications Wave April’20 Launch Event

From all the new features coming to the Power Platform, I found the UI flow very interesting. In combination with an on-premises gateway, Power Automate (aka. Flow) can be used to interact with locally installed windows applications and websites. This is especially interesting to integrate legacy applications without an API. I’ve made a short Video how to use the UI Flows for web sites to get the actual Bitcoin / EUR rate and send it via Email.